Email & Groupware

When it comes to Email most people would agree that having uninterrupted access is essential and with that in mind GEN developed the GENZone messaging service. GENZone and its big brother GENX provide cloud based email and groupware services to Thunderbird, Outlook, Apple Mail, iPhone, iPad, Android and many other standards based messaging clients in addition to via any web browser. As long as you have internet access, you have access to your email, contacts, calendars, files and so on and all this without having to expose your corporate network to the internet and deploy high grade firewalls. GENX brings corporate and enterprise class email services with military grade encryption both in storage and transit and optionally double layer message encryption for total security and confidentiality. If your looking for a solution that will keep your email messages completely secure from anyone trying to intercept then you need to seriously consider GENX.

But GENX takes the whole platform to the next level with features such as:

Share your folders, contacts calendars and notes between groups or companywide. Each user can be specifically given read, create, update and delete permissions. Public folders can receive email directly from an email address or as a list digest. A common use for Public Folders is to receive email where a group of people will read and process such as a sales or accounts mailbox, or to archive reports from internal or external systems such as daily financial reports or delivery records.

Mailing Lists, Distribution Lists and Membership

Mailing Lists can be setup to allow both local and remove mailbox users can receive email send to a list address. Each member of the list can have permission to Post Only, Read Only, Post and Read, etc and members can subscribe and unsubscribe via email automatically (if enabled). Mail sent to the list can be moderated, or a list password can be used to prevent unauthorised or accidental use. Distribution Lists work in the same way except that the subscription is fixed as is the list address.

Centralised Archival and KMS Integration

Some companies in specific markets such as Healthcare, Legal, and banking require a copy of every email sent and received to be archived for all time and of course we can do this. We can also integrate archived email, List email, Shared & Public folders with your Knowledge Management System such as OpenKM. If you don't want archival then you can be assured that when you delete a message, we delete the message too.

Server Based Automation

You can of course setup out of office and holiday auto-responders, but the auto-responder system is far more advanced and enables complex routing and return to be setup so that an email received would automatically send a customised response. A good example here would be automatically accepting queries, assigning an ID, returning a thank you and then passing that query into a public folder.

AntiSpam & AntiVirus

We are all about stopping Spam, and protecting customers with advanced anti-virus and anti-phishing filters. We achieve a very high spam detection rate whilst maintaining a very low false positive rate and this is done mainly through continuous adjustment of the filters by our highly skilled staff. We keep our finger on the pulse and make changes almost in realtime to protect customers from evolving threats. When you combine this with our exceptional GEN-BSS Mobile, Laptop, Desktop and Server antivirus protection and your safe as it gets.

High Level S/MIME and end to end encryption

We fully support and provide S/MIME Certification for your clients to ensure that your email travels completely encrypted between colleagues and for those who are not enrolled in S/MIME a digital signature that guarantees the email is from your business and has been unaltered in transit. In this world there is really no excuse not to use strong encryption when sending confidential email. But that's not it, we take it further and store your email in an encrypted state to further protection your messages, and we're still not done. For the very highest security we can establish a secure encrypted tunnel between your device and our servers to ensure absolute protection of your email contents.

Limited Logging

We log diagnostic data in realtime for up to 36 hours, but after that its gone, and we never ever log message contents.

AntiSpam Maxim

GEN's development team is pleased to announce the general availability of our new Corporate Anti-Spam service for company email gateways and domains. Maxim extends our standard Corporate Anti-Spam and Anti-Virus gateways by providing process intensive enhanced spam and virus detection which greatly reduces the volume to Spam to virtually zero.

We asked 47 professional users of the GENZone platform to participate in the trial of this new service by subscribing an IMAP folder called 'Maxim' and moving any spam received into that folder. Using this feedback we were able to fine tune the system to maximise its effectiveness and gather valuable performance metrics.

The fight against Spam

The detection of spam is a continuos battle between the spammers and companies like us who are dedicated to eliminating it. As we evolve so do the spammers and we have to invest ever more complex and expensive technologies to counter them. Some of the technologies are outlined below:

Standards: The internet is governed by a set of standards known as RFC's and the email delivery protocol is specified by RFC822 and RFC5321. The standards exist so that email can be interoperable between all platforms and servers, but spammers using email bots don't care about being compliant. By enforcing the standards and rejecting violations we can eliminate a percentage of spam, and of course legitimate email from organisations who can't configure their email system correctly.

The blacklist: A number of worthy organisations like Spamhaus, SpamCop, Talos, etc are dedicated to maintaining lists of domains, hosts and subnets which are used to originate spam. Using these blacklists is an expensive but effective tool to eliminate a good percentage of spam at the first gate. Blacklists however are not truly realtime, and there is always a delay between a spammer launching a mass mailing and the blacklists listing it.

Authentication: Several technologies exist to verify sender domains and hosts such as SPF & DKIM and these can serve (where used by the receiving server) to block spoofed spam which constitutes the vast majority of scams. For example, the HMRC who are under constant attack from scammers specify in their SPF records two hosts that are allowed to send email for @hmrc.gov.uk and of course the spammers cannot originate email from those addresses so SPF wins the day and any email coming from, say This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it. that doesn't come from the two hosts listed in the SPF record are canned. This however all falls down then either the receiving server doesn't check, the sending organisation doesn't use it, or the sending organisation has been compromised.

DNS: The domain name system is that which coverts gen.net.uk to 212.140.242.10 and back again, and when you send email to someone @gen.net.uk DNS gives up the address of the mail server that is designated to receive that email, in this case farpoint.gen.net.uk. The RFC1124/1124 which form part of Internet Standard 1 specify clearly that every host on the internet should have forward and reverse DNS, that is gen.net.uk to 212.140.242.10 and 212.140.242.10 to gen.net.uk. So, when a host spamer.com connects from 212.140.242.50 to our mail server, we (a) check that 212.140.242.50 corresponds to spammer.com, that spammer.com has a valid MX record and that the host listed in the MX record actually exists on the internet. This is particularly hard for a spammer to forge and therefore this check eliminates a percentage of spam as well as a percentage of legitimate email from companies who don't know how to setup DNS correctly.

Content Filtering: By far the most effective tool at eliminating spam which passes all the above tests is pattern matching. This involves looking and detecting elements in the body of an email and assigning a score to each detection. An example would be a HTML only email which scores 3 points, external links to pictures which scores 0.2 points each and so on. The more spammy the email the most points it will accumulate and once a threshold is reached the message is flagged as spam. Content filtering can make use of content lists which are maintained by third parties and provide known phrases and content to score.

URI Blacklists: Many, in fact almost all spam email contains a link (or links) to websites to complete the process. These links (or URI's) are constantly changing but lists are maintained and inward email is checked for these URI's and excluded if found to contain one or more. This means that even if a spam flood is being originated from many hosts at once we can still trap it at the gateway based on content.

Bayesian Probability Filtering: A gross simplification of this would be that email which is known to be spam can be 'learned' and that data used to identify 'similar' spam. The area of mathematics is complex and the techniques even more so, but the result is the same in that spam that looks like spam based on learned data can be flagged as such, usually by giving it a score, such as +10

When you combine all these techniques together you wind up with a spam detection system that, in our tests has an effective performance of 99.67% which is exceptional in the market. Spammy email is passed through with subject modifications for your gateway to filter (or not) as you require, or for individual users to filter using IMAP or similar rules. Full Diagnostic information is provided in email headers to permit more complex filtering based on spam score or infection type should this be required by your IT Team.

Customers with GENX and GENZone and those with gateways and dedicated services can have this added to their email feed for a nominal charge.

For more information or to request a free 30 day demo please contact us today.

Our Marketplace

If your looking for cheap email then this is not the solution for you, but if your looking for highly scaleable and secure email services with excellent support and performance then contact us today for a live demonstration!